Mahmud Abouhalima

Mahmud Abouhalima (1959-) was an al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and al-Qaeda member who was a convicted perpetrator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Biography
Mahmud Abouhalima was born in 1959 in Kafr Dawar, the son of a mill foreman. He was a member of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya in his youth, and in 1981 he dropped out of Alexandria University and moved to West Germany. There, he had a life of girls, drugs, and other vices that he would later call "corruption", and he married two German women to allow him to stay in the country as long as possible. In 1986, he moved to the United States and became a taxi driver in New York City, and he was accepted as a permanent resident after inventing a story that he was an agricultural worker. His license was suspended ten times for traffic violations and attempts to overcharge a customer, and he worked at a charity raising funds for the Afghan Mujahideen. In 1988, he headed to Afghanistan to prove his faith, and he received combat training in Peshawar, Pakistan. When he returned to the United States, he took gun lessons on Long Island, and he wore a National Rifle Association cap during practice. He was supposed to drive the getaway car when El Sayyid Nosair assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, but Nosair accidentally entered another cab instead. On 26 February 1993, he was seen meeting with Mohammed A. Salameh at a Jersey City storage facility before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and he fled to Saudi Arabia and then to Egypt after the attack. He was arrested and tortured back in Egypt, and he was mummified in duct tape when he was sent back to America. He was sentenced to 1,300 months in prison, 108 years, in 1994.